I’m going with Walmart. Walmart is profiting from this situation. Walmart underpays its emplyees, the government picks up the slack and pays the remainder (freeing Walmart from that expenditure), and the money is then handed straight back to Walmart anyway when the staffer spends them there out of convenience.

Walmart might be freed from some expenditure by this process, but it’s also forgoing considerable revenue.

Most of the people I’ve known who work in retail tend to shop at their employer’s business. If they paid out the 4 and half billion in wages themselves, I’m pretty sure that 50% at least of that would go straight back into sales. More importantly, if Walmart were to pay decent wages, similar low wage employers would be doing much the same. More people with more money to spend on the food and household items they were previously skimping on? More sales revenue for Walmart.

Say rather ‘more sales revenue for Walmart and a bunch of other businesses.’ Part of that increased wage would ccertainly be handed straight back to them, but once a person is freed from subsistence, they can begin to splash out on more exotic purchases beyond their basic groceries. Meaning, other people will be getting a piece of the action.

The video pictured an employee paid $8.81/hr getting a raise up to $13.63/hr, a raise of about 55%. But when passed on to the consumer, it involved increasing prices only 1.4%. That’s only 2.6% of the raises that these employees had gotten in this scenario.

Which is much much much much less than the 100% that opponents of minimum-wage increases typically imply as the price increase necessary to accommodate wage increase.